Jason Knight

The less code you use, the less there is to break

Nov 14, 2017

I'm a fan of Flo's Notepad 2, which is based on Scintilla without being a total piece of Scite. (I say, I say, that's a joke son...). I use it for pretty much EVERY programming language I use ranging from 6502 assembly to modern full stack ECMAScript with mixes of just about everything in-between.

I like it because it has NONE of the bloat and BS that just gets in my damned way as a programmer. SO MANY "features" people seem to love to me are just usability headaches that leave me screaming at the display "For **** sake just let me SEE THE CODE and bloody well TYPE!!!"

See asshattery like tabbed editing -- which if you're a widescreen user or a multi-display user defeats the point of even having WINDOWS. Separate windows -- so you can do things like have your HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript ALL OPEN SIDE-BY-SIDE so you can refer to them. Or having the PHP and CSS open side-by-side on one display whilst having FF or Vivaldi open in another with the document inspector. Or like having command line compilers open in one window with the editor next to it so you get REAL feedback instead of the dumbed down half-assed garbage that are most IDE's.

Another thing I find utterly useless is colour syntax highlighting -- that illegible acid-trip just makes it impossible for me to actually READ THE DAMNED CODE! How anyone can use that I'll never understand. It was illegible crap back when I first encountered it in Turbo Pascal 4 in the '80's, and it remains useless illegible crap to this day. This is made even worse by the defaults or choices in many editors that I have no clue how the **** anybody can even see that there's text being displayed. (Yes Sublime, I'm looking at you. Sub-par is more like it.)

I also don't need no Joe-damned "project management" crap as I know what directories, a filesystem, and a taskbar are. I also know how to ^C^V and use a mouse, and may even go as far as naming files and functions something meaningful instead of slopping out code with endless <div class="style1"><h2 class="style2"><span class="style3"> idiocy!

To that same end I don't want any stupid "toolbars" as I know how to ^C^V^H^G alt-f-s. MAYBE if we still had to dick around with wordstar ^K commands I could see it, but this isn't 1982. Likewise those space-wasting sidebar areas filled with garbage like code folding, project management, realtime function references -- waste of precious screen real-estate that could be better used for what I'm actually working on.

Don't even get me STARTED about idiotic halfwit nonsense like autocomplete/tag completion that takes me more time to use than if I just typed the bloody thing, or worse often incorrectly detects and changes what I'm typing making me waste time correcting code that would have been better spent WRITING IT!

My needs are pretty simple. Clear legible high contrast text, multiple character encoding support, regex search and replace, line numbers, indentation guides, long-line guides, tab to space and back conversion, trailing blank stripping, block indentation/de-indent, word-wrap markers, case conversion, simple and basic statistics about file size, line number count, and current cursor position.

... and if I'm lucky it will follow the same control standards that have been around since Windows 2. Again, ^X^C^V^H, and the various alt-menu commands.

Anything more than that is just going to piss me off and get in my damned way.

Daniel Gwilt

Eat, sleep and drink code.

Nov 20, 2017

Notepad 2 is great, except it only runs on windows. This is the primary reason I switched to Atom. The other major reason is Atom was built with web tools (HTML, CSS, JavaScript). I also enjoy all the customization it has. You don't want syntax highlighting? Disable it. Don't like default colors, download a new theme or create your own.

Daniel Gwilt Atom is pretty good, and when on other platforms it's definitely on my short-list... but I have trouble justifying the massive Electron runtime just to run an editor on windows, particularly when the load time and performance is so piss poor compared to Notepad 2's 900k executable. (which still feels massive to me when we're just talking a lousy text editor). By the time Electron is in place I might as well have installed Wine.

Though at least it's not as bad on performance as say, jEdit or anything else written in Java where even on a quad core i7 I can outrun the keyboard buffer.

That said, I'm a fan of Electron itself, I've been using it on a number of projects as it's just better documented and seemingly more "robust" than nw.js -- though their "recent" (past year) move to package based distribution instead of "just let me download a pre-built binary archive, unpack it, and run the damned thing" hasn't exactly gone over well with me. You can still find it, but they've buried it in terms of finding the files and how to set it up. They seem to have forgotten that NPM is a giant middle finger to developers who do NOT run Linsux on their desktops.

You raise a good point though about ANY decent editor-- or ANY decent software really. The GOOD stuff, the "best in class" as it were, let you turn "features" on and off; as what's useful to one person could be cripplingly useless to another!

Search Hashnode